Always hide your forum email address after registration.

[Faisal2202]

some people don’t really know about this so after creating account, they just start using it without changing email visibility to private.

AFAIK, when you create a new account, your email address is automatically set to hidden settings like by default, so how can new users can do the mistake of making their email publicly, plus i can not imagine how someone having access to your email address can hack your BTT account, because As clapping is not done with one hand, so is the account can not be hacked by only making it publicly visible.

Origin of hacking starts when the victim made some mistake, for example, a spammer or hacker can use your email address + your wallet address in different airdrops or giveaways which have no double confirmation system to get high number of affiliate by masquerading. And hacker can send you email or messages to convince you to click on the provided link. And once you do it, all of your access to BTT account could be compromised by the hacker. (cross site scripting attack; a very common cyber attack) If in future your account got hacked you can look into the following topics. (maybe now for use in future.)

• Recovering hacked/lost accounts by theymos (Administrator)

The best practice to safe your Bitcointalk account is;

• Do not use your main BTT email in any bounty, signature, airdrop or giveaway campaigns. Use another email address.
• If you are using another email address, then never link your publicly visible email with the main email address.
• Do not fall prey to phishing attacks. How? get familiar with the environments and by remaining up-to-date.

Overall, the security of our assets and accounts is in our own hands.

[tbterryboy]

I'm not sure why this forum is specifically mentioned for hiding an email address when it's a thing everywhere on the internet. Just don't leave your email address public anywhere, it will almost certainly be misused in some way. The Bitcointalk forum is no special exception.
There are also bounty campaigns that collect email addresses, I believe that many of them have submitted their primary email address.

Even if you take care of all such things, "hacking" of the user base of a large service happens very often, so you can easily be overwhelmed by spam.

Well, services that collect email addresses can always use them for their benefits, they may even sell them to email marketers for money without your consent, or maybe with your consent since you might at some point agreed to their terms of service without even realizing what kind of rights you are giving them about your personal data.

That isn't only for bounty campaigns, but it's for every service that we use on the internet where we provide real and authentic personal information a lot of times. We don't realize what we are doing when we click on the "I agree" button given at the end of every registration page.

[Luffygroove]

Come on, don't be too bitter about this thread. I think we need to be grateful for each piece of information and education that's been shared here because probably not all people are aware of this, and besides, it's in the Beginners & Help section, which means it's primarily intended for newbies. However, thanks to those who clarified that the email hidden setting is actually on by default. We can change the default setting if we want to show our email for certain purposes. All of this is valuable information for newbies, so there's nothing wrong with it.

[cryptoaddictchie]

What is the point of hiding your email for registration here, if your email Stable080@gmail.com can be found in bounty spreadsheets. I am 99% sure you have used that email to register here

Maybe he used different one for airdrops and bounty. Of course before doing an account here an email is provided and that can be a private email, and not will be used for that activity since its personal. But I think there is always an option for a change email if the one he used has been exposed or already been used for airdrops.

[Accardo]

I once thought about a single advantage of unveiling our email address on our profile page, except that it's also linked to our account and used for forgot password activity, guest of the forum who can't send pm can easily contact a member through their emails for business purposes. Supposing that the forum is filled with only cool headed people both guests, that would have been a good alternative means of contacting people. Since the disadvantages as Op advised outweighs the advantage it's important to hide the email and substitute it with our social media links, a space is made available for that too.

[Litzki1990]

Most members hide their email address for security reasons.  Even after opening an account, everyone's email address is automatically highlighted in the system if the user does not click on the option to show email address later in the account settings. 
However, for security reasons, it is better to heighten everyone's email address. Because if the email address is shown in the profile, different fraudsters or hackers try to do their different illegal activities with that email address.
But if you create an account with a temporary Gmail then there is no need to hide that Gmail. Because no fraudster or hacker can succeed in any of their activities with temporary Gmail.

However, accounts should always be created with an active Gmail account. Because later, if there is any problem with the account, the account can be accessed with that active Gmail.

[crwth]

There are services where you could try to limit the emails that you use. What I mean by this is you are going to be using the iCloud as the tool in which you could hide email if you do not want to be public in the first place in any registration.

It is the Hide My Email function. It is really helpful for me because I want to use a single email but not completely possible lol but it helps.

[examplens]

Well, services that collect email addresses can always use them for their benefits, they may even sell them to email marketers for money without your consent, or maybe with your consent since you might at some point agreed to their terms of service without even realizing what kind of rights you are giving them about your personal data.

I registered on Coinmarketcap, although honestly, I'm still not sure why I did it. A couple of years ago, they announced that their database had been hacked, and after that, I was flooded with spam. The same thing happened to me after the hack at Ledger. It took some time until I adjusted the spam filters, luckily there was an alternative email address, and it didn't cause me many problems.
Whether it was a hack or they sold email lists, is very difficult to prove.

[Despairo]

If you're care with your account's security, hiding your email address aren't enough, you need to follow few other steps:

1. Don't use a same email address or password if you want to sign up on the other sites.
2. Don't set up security password because it could make your account locked.
3. Don't share your social media in this forum, this will increase a risk in your account.

[Erumo]

What is the point of hiding your email for registration here, if your email Stable080@gmail.com can be found in bounty spreadsheets. I am 99% sure you have used that email to register here

Maybe he used different one for airdrops and bounty. Of course before doing an account here an email is provided and that can be a private email, and not will be used for that activity since its personal. But I think there is always an option for a change email if the one he used has been exposed or already been used for airdrops.

Maybe. Maybe yes, maybe no. But he is teaching to hide email after registration, yet his email is seen when he registered for bounty. Then where is that edge and criteria where to hide and to show emails?

What is the goal to hide email in profile? For protection and to prevent being scammed. It took me few minutes to get his email from bounty. More advanced search from a professional can connect that email with something else and who knows where that could lead. Perhaps even to an email used here for registration.

For me his advice looks like this:



Anyway, just forget about me. Stable090 has given a good advice. Well done !

[jrrsparkles]

Not always, if you want you can hide but dor someone who is offering service via bitcointalk then keeping it is public is important and if you don't want your primary email to be exposed you can change your email at anytime you want and keep it public.

I get the intention of OP is trying to say most malicious links are sent via email and if its available in public they can Target a newbie because they are easy prey for scammers since they can be deceived easily.

[Lida93]

What is the point of hiding your email for registration here, if your email Stable080@gmail.com can be found in bounty spreadsheets. I am 99% sure you have used that email to register here

Except for a gullible fellow, else everyone supposed to have designated emails for different purposes according to their importance to you. It's another way to show how responsible you're about your privacy and security.

So @Erumo if you have been using a single email for different important purposes they it's advisable you desist from it as your assets and information are easily susceptible to access without any scammer or hacker haven to think twice if the particular email is the right one for the very information they need.

[CryptSafe]

It is generally advised that one should not use their official email for Crypto activities or even here onboard this platform. So I believe OP knows about that and would not make such mistake. Maybe that email he saw on the spreadsheet might be a default email just to fill up the space by abiding to the campaign rules.

However, the forum administrators knows about this that is why upon registration, the email is first on default that no one would have access to it only you not until you change the settings to wether you want the general public to see it or only you alone can see it at first.

[Rigon]

Snip

Hiding email is not important here. If you think I will hide the email then you can hide the email. And if you think I won't hide the email then that's your personal matter. But here if your email is not registered with a strong password and if your bitcoin account is created with the same password of that email then of course you can hide your email. Also, if your email is being used for any good business purpose, you must hide your email. Because later there may be problems for your business site. Apart from that, I don't see any problem.

[Z390]

Rule number 1, don't ever use your original email address to open forum account, there us no way to know if anyone is watching you and your email address might be a target, always use an alternative or brand new email account.

Also, this forum automatically makes your email account invisible when you register on this forum, you will have to make your email address visible yourself by activating it in your profile, which is a stupid move to me.

Imagine talking about how much money you've made from crypto investment in a thread and bad actors on here decide to use your email address as a trap for you, they can send malicious emails to your inbox and wait for you to make a mistake by clicking on links.

[KingsDen]

When one creates an account, there is a default setting that makes email hidden; it's only when one goes to the settings that you can manually activate the make email public option. It's only those who are on this forum to advertise their product and don't care about privacy who can make their email public so that their targeted audience can reach out to them through those emails. 

Yea, it seems things have changed because when I was a newbie, someone called my attention to my visible email address to hide it. Which I believed was unhidden from beginning. Although, I wasn't the one that created my account, maybe someone that did unchecked the hide email box. I doubt that anyone will like to uncheck that.

Recently, I created an account for someone and the hide email box was checked default. Maybe things are changing rapidly in the forum.

[Josefjix]

I'm not sure why this forum is specifically mentioned for hiding an email address when it's a thing everywhere on the internet. Just don't leave your email address public anywhere, it will almost certainly be misused in some way. The Bitcointalk forum is no special exception.
There are also bounty campaigns that collect email addresses, I believe that many of them have submitted their primary email address.

Even if you take care of all such things, "hacking" of the user base of a large service happens very often, so you can easily be overwhelmed by spam.

It was clearly stated by the manager not to use email related to users account, it doesn't take more than 3 minutes to create new Gmail account but lazy bums will still use primary emails, this is the internet and no matter how careful one may be one also left something behind for hackers to use, keeping it completely private on the internet is the most difficult thing to do, those who care about privacy and security don't use social media

Yea, it seems things have changed because when I was a newbie, someone called my attention to my visible email address to hide it. Which I believed was unhidden from beginning. Although, I wasn't the one that created my account, maybe someone that did unchecked the hide email box. I doubt that anyone will like to uncheck that.

Recently, I created an account for someone and the hide email box was checked default. Maybe things are changing rapidly in the forum.

use social media.

Oh, this is wonderful. It should have been checked automatically when we first got here, as many of us had our email addresses exposed, but it's nice to see that the box is now checked by default.

[virasog]

After creating forum account here, some of us do make mistake of leaving our email public, some people don’t really know about this so after creating account, they just start using it without changing email visibility to private.

Well, when we create an account on bitcointalk, the email visibility is hidden by default and therefore we do not need to experiment with its settings. Some people may make their email visible and there could be number of reasons for this. For example someone offering any service or selling any goods and may want his email to be visible to everyone so people can contact him via email too.

We hope that in the future signatures will stop requesting data publicly and some of them are encrypted in private messages.

The signature campaigns especially the bounties, does not care much about the privacy of the individuals as they often ask for Telegram, Emails when filling the bounty spreadsheet. And those sheets are publicly available for anyone to get the emails / telegrams and use them for advertising stuff.

[Ahli38]

After creating forum account here, some of us do make mistake of leaving our email public, some people don’t really know about this so after creating account, they just start using it without changing email visibility to private.

I appreciate your efforts OP in reminding beginners about the importance of maintaining the privacy of the email used to register in this forum so that it is not displayed to the public. But actually it should also be noted that the setting to hide email from the public in this forum has been applied immediately to every newcomer who registers. or by default the email will be hidden from the public after we register. So I'm not worried that beginners will skip this step. because their email has been automatically hidden from the public by the default forum system.

but I think what we have to worry about and we have to remind beginners is that they have to register/provide an email that is different from the one registered for an account on this forum if they take part in a bounty or something that requires providing an email address as a condition for joining. although it seems that even without warning, beginners are also aware of this. but it never hurts to give each other attention and advice.

[Stable090]

Well, when we create an account on bitcointalk, the email visibility is hidden by default and therefore we do not need to experiment with its settings. Some people may make their email visible and there could be number of reasons for this. For example someone offering any service or selling any goods and may want his email to be visible to everyone so people can contact him via email too.

I didn’t notice if it’s always hidden by default, I was just going through my account recently and I came across it, then I decided to check if people can see my email, after making sure that it’s hidden, then I decided to start thinking about risk associated with leaving your email address public. With your email public, your account can be easily hacked, am sure most newbies might not even know this.

The signature campaigns especially the bounties, does not care much about the privacy of the individuals as they often ask for Telegram, Emails when filling the bounty spreadsheet. And those sheets are publicly available for anyone to get the emails / telegrams and use them for advertising stuff.

Some managers are high rank members of the forum, it will be better if they can adjust their rules, I see no reason why they should publish users email address and telegram username on spreadsheet, even if they need those details, it should be kept private not public where everyone can see and copy it, am sure lots of people will have been scammed just because managers publish their details on spreadsheet and scammers were able to have access to it and the scammer will start communicating with the user.